Star Wars: The Old Republic’s lead writer on good Sith, evil Jedi

In the upcoming Star Wars MMO The Old Republic, you can become either a Jedi …

It's hard to show off an MMO title within the constraints of a trade show, so I rarely feel like I walk away from such meetings with a good idea of what the game is actually like to play. It was stressed to the press during the game's latest demo that this is a game built on a strong story, and you can play your character however you'd like. In one scene we saw the ramifications of both being merciful and executing an NPC. The idea of an online game with such a rich world and story is appealing.

But what happens if I'm a Jedi who consistently does the wrong thing? Will I ever fall and join the ranks of the Sith? I wanted to find out.

Building a culture versus striking a pose

I sat down with Daniel Erickson, the lead writer of The Old Republic to figure out how your decisions affect your class and your standing among the Jedi or the Sith. If I'm playing a Jedi, is it possible to do so many evil acts that I turn into a Sith character? The movies present the slide as being something chosen by your actions and motivations, but in The Old Republic things are very different.

So what happens if I'm unfailingly evil as a Jedi? Do the Sith try to recruit me? "No, and the reason is... this is a hard one to look at because we made them entire cultures," Erickson told Ars. "The Sith we see [in the movies], even Vader, are not actually Sith, they are harkening back to a tradition from years ago—they are fallen Jedi. The Sith in our game are actually Sith; they are from a different empire that was almost wiped out of existence by the Jedi."

We're getting into some seriously nerdy territory here, but as a Star Wars fan I'm right in my element. I've never thought about it this way: the Sith in the movies were mostly given Jedi training first, and then fell to the dark side and began to call themselves Sith Lords. It's an anachronism more than a title at that point.

"I always take it back to the World War 2 analogy: if you were a very evil British soldier in World War 2, you wouldn't join the Nazis; you were torturing them in the basement," Erickson explained. "You're a bad man, but that doesn't mean you're going to leave your country. You're going to do what you're trying to do in the worst possible way."

The thing is, this goes the other way as well. "This is what's really hard for people to wrap their heads around sometimes. A light-side Sith is going to try to make his horrible screwed-up country better," Erickson said. "A Sith is given, by his society, unlimited power to do whatever he wants unless a stronger Sith can stop him. So a light-side Sith warrior can walk out there and protect the Imperial people, because he thinks the other side is crazy."

I asked him if this is the logical progression to "might makes right," and he nodded enthusiastically. "Exactly, and in our game, it could actually be right." It's a subtle thing: the Sith and the Jedi aren't the good and bad guys; instead, it's more of a cultural distinction this far back in the Star Wars timeline. So you can be a good man and still fight the Jedi, and you can try to end the Sith through evil means. The choice is in your hands, as it should be in games of this scope.

That about sums it up. The movies out now cover that era long after TOR, and thus the Sith in TOR era are all just jedi who have fallen to the dark side and follow the path of the Sith as they became (a sect sorta) and not the race of people known as the Sith who, like the Humans, did not have a majority of force users. They were normal everyday people.

They foster gameplay styles that for many types of games could be considered mutually exclusive, especially in the MMO world, where arrays of keys are the norm, and a joypad just doesn't have enough buttons.

For some reason, the fact that its an MMO was totally lost on me.

I won't be playing or buying this game. For some reason I thought this was another KOTOR

The duel on Mustafar was probably one of the high points of the prequel trilogy. It gets even better when you realize that, unlike some other battles (notably those involving Palpatine) where the action was digitally sped up, Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor actually performed that duel at the speed you see on screen. The story goes that when they finished the final take, they got applause from the entire crew.

And its also pretty awesome to compare Obi-Wan's mastery of Form III to Anakin's use of Form V, as both are quite nicely on display. So yeah, I like that scene.

The duel on Mustafar was probably one of the high points of the prequel trilogy. It gets even better when you realize that, unlike some other battles (notably those involving Palpatine) where the action was digitally sped up, Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor actually performed that duel at the speed you see on screen. The story goes that when they finished the final take, they got applause from the entire crew.

And its also pretty awesome to compare Obi-Wan's mastery of Form III to Anakin's use of Form V, as both are quite nicely on display. So yeah, I like that scene.

I did not know of these sword styles! That does explain why some Jedi weren't able to hold off against multiple blaster fire while Obi Wan could.

That bothered me alot in Episode 3, that actually makes alot of sense if that Jedi that gunned down didn't use Form 3....

The thing I didn't like the most about the Episode 1-3 movies (besides Jar Jar) was the lightsaber dueling however, though it was more flashy, the older movies used more practical swordsmanship. It quite frankly made the Episode 4-6 movies look like the characters forgot that they can do a force jump triple flip sword slash behind their back while eating a sandwich.

I understand why they did it (it was entertaining), but the techniques they using were so over the top that it became a plot hole of why Luke couldn't do it.

I'll never fully understand the hate for the movies though, I enjoyed them.

The duel on Mustafar was probably one of the high points of the prequel trilogy. It gets even better when you realize that, unlike some other battles (notably those involving Palpatine) where the action was digitally sped up, Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor actually performed that duel at the speed you see on screen. The story goes that when they finished the final take, they got applause from the entire crew.

And its also pretty awesome to compare Obi-Wan's mastery of Form III to Anakin's use of Form V, as both are quite nicely on display. So yeah, I like that scene.

I did not know of these sword styles! That does explain why some Jedi weren't able to hold off against multiple blaster fire while Obi Wan could.

That bothered me alot in Episode 3, that actually makes alot of sense if that Jedi that gunned down didn't use Form 3....

The thing I didn't like the most about the Episode 1-3 movies (besides Jar Jar) was the lightsaber dueling however, though it was more flashy, the older movies used more practical swordsmanship. It quite frankly made the Episode 4-6 movies look like the characters forgot that they can do a force jump triple flip sword slash behind their back while eating a sandwich.

I understand why they did it (it was entertaining), but the techniques they using were so over the top that it became a plot hole of why Luke couldn't do it.

I'll never fully understand the hate for the movies though, I enjoyed them.

I never had much problem with the lightsaber combat throughout. The first instance of a lightsaber duel that we see in the originals involves the same combatants as the final duel of the prequels. But both were then fairly old men, being that a couple of decades had passed. Obi-Wan hadn't dueled anyone in over 20 years, and Anakin certainly didn't have his old freedom of movement, what with the heavy armor and lack of biological limbs.

When Luke faced Vader for the first time, we saw more activity from both combatants, but Vader still had his same disadvantages, and Luke couldn't pull off the flashy moves because he'd technically had all of a couple days of lightsaber training with Obi-Wan at best. He didn't have the strength, either physically (a major part of Vader's Djem So style) or in the Force, to go up against Vader's experience.

Return of the Jedi shows us Luke after his training with Yoda, more in tune with the Force and with himself. After the training we see on Dagobah, he'd clearly become stronger, faster, etc. And from the assault on Jabba's yacht to the final battle with Darth Vader, we see more of the kind of combat the prequels would later use. Still, the formal training wasn't available, as Luke was effectively the last of the Jedi, and hadn't had the decades worth of training most padawans usually received, much less full Jedi Knights.

In contrast, the prequels showed us the Jedi Order at its height, just before its fall to Order 66 and the Great Jedi Purge. Lightsaber combat was at its peak at that point, with masters such as Yoda, Mace Windu, Cin Drallig, and others taking the various forms to their most refined. So from an in-universe standpoint, it makes sense that we would see more advanced techniques in the prequels. Also, Qui-Gon and (at first) Obi-Wan were practitioners of Form IV, the most acrobatic of all seven forms; Dooku claimed he knew "every weakness of the Ataru form, with its ridiculous acrobatics." Watch the scenes in which he fights; his style is far closer to "practical swordsmanship", designed as it was specifically for lightsaber-to-lightsaber combat.

I also didn't mind the prequels. While they weren't of the same caliber as the originals, I've recently re-watched them, and realized that they're quite entertaining and that I've seen far, far worse movies.

This sounds like a rationalization for not wanting to implement potentially complex faction relations to me.

I'm sure the reason they originally did it was this. But I don't think it's as much of a stretch as you believe. For example, I think no empire could last where backstabbing was constantly happening. I don't think an empire could hold together if there wasn't an element of cooperation and not the constant domination you speak of. That is, sometimes it's bad to be good.

More to the point, this universe is one of wartime. The Jedi were peacekeepers, not generals. But they became generals in the movies because they had to. I think the Sith would welcome anyone willing to help them win the war as long as they did not try to openly oppose their agenda. The Sith are not going to have an agenda of, "Be evil." (Anti-Google). They have an agenda of taking over. If a sympathetic Sith is running around space ships, sparing Captains, and it actually works, giving them successful missions, then I don't think the Sith leadership are going to go, "You spared that man's life and saved the day. You did what we commanded and it is Mission Accomplished. For being good, you must die."

Nor will the Jedi turn away a helping hand that leans toward the... "stern." Sure, if a Jedi goes completely off the rails and wholesale slaughters everyone in his path, I'm sure the Jedi would raise an eyebrow, but conveniently the game doesn't let you commit genocide. Or does it? I mean, most games like this have factions and you can't attack your own faction at the drop of a hat, specifically to prevent you from doing something that would MAKE you incompatible with your faction.

Already, the Jedi are supposed to be about peace, contemplation. Even Yoda said the Force was not meant to be used for attack, but there you go, Jedi all over the place, Force Pushing people off cliffs, Force Pulling a lightsabre to slash someone to death with a laser sword. Etc. Jedi, as with any culture, accept that in wartime, there is violence.

You're thinking of the world in black and white terms when it's gray. Jedi are a lighter shade of gray while the Sith are a darker shade of gray. But neither side is going to give someone the boot for not doing what is needed if you're doing what is needed, regardless of your methods of doing it. Also, remember, these characters you play are the extraordinary figures. We're the Skywalkers, the Han Solo's, the Chewie's of this time period. We're not Nameless Gungan #4, killed by a stray explosive ball thrown by Jar-Jar or run over by an out of control tank also by Jar-Jar.

As such, we're important enough to tolerate, even if our tendencies are... a bit out of the mainstream for the society in which our character resides.

For a non-cartoony evil Imperial agent, see Thrawn. He was ruthless but I draw a distinction between that and needless cruelty or petty violence, which I don't remember him displaying. So I think it is possible. Granted I last read those books...12-14 years ago?

It would be pretty ironic if the Jedi victory over the Sith was enabled by an "evil Jedi".

Kind of like the Allies winning WWII due to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If you look at those two acts separate from their context(killing huge amounts of civilian population who had very-little-to-nothing to do with the war), there is no way to call them anything but evil. And yet, they accomplished a very good end, which was stopping the war.

Good prose mimics life in that, good and evil are *never* mutually exclusive. Heroes always have flaws, and villains ultimately have humanity. This is true in the microcosm of people and the macrocosm of humanity as a whole. Finding it in a video game just means that Roger Ebert's dictum on video games as (not) art is getting further and further from the truth.

I know this is way late and few will see this, but I have never felt more connected to Ogre yelling "NEERRRRRRDDDDS!" in my life. And I'm including time at DragonCon somehow.

All I know about Star Wars is there were 3 movies, and 3 videos by Red Letter Media explaining what was wrong with the prequels. (And a thousand books that don't count, good and bad games, and ten million pieces of merchandise, but that ruins the point.)

Earlier comments do remind me of people raiding quest npcs and the actual cities in Everquest. "Oh hey let's kill my class guild leader to see what he drops, I'll just zone to avoid the faction hit."

At this point, I'm wondering if someone wrote out a storyline for the prequel trilogy that Lucas aggressively rewrote, having failed to understand it, and twisting it almost beyond recognition. I say this because it seems to me that there are pieces of a more complex, meaningful, and coherent storyline, like the parts of a locomotive, scattered throughout the train wreck of the actual prequel trilogy.

For instance, one thing that seems surprisingly consistent about Yoda is that, with a few exceptions when he was training Luke on Dagobah, all Yoda's advice and all his decisions are wrong. In particular, Yoda advises Luke that going to save his friends on Bespin would be disastrous and that he should ignore his feelings; Luke, by trusting his feelings, saved the people who enabled the Rebellion to defeat the Empire at Endor. Yoda (and Obi-Wan) warned Luke that Darth Vader was utterly beyond redemption; Luke trusted his feelings and turned Darth Vader/Anakin back to the light side, which meant the defeat of the Emperor.

The "prophecy" mentioned briefly in the prequel trilogy would have made perfect sense if it was Luke Skywalker who brought balance to the Force, by balancing the passion of the Dark Side with the calm reflection of the Light Side.

Can't you easily imagine a story about the good guys, the underdogs who believe in passion and creativity, overcoming the rigid, cold, unfeeling guardians of the status quo? Wouldn't a story in which the two sides were out of balance, each with their own claim to being right, have made more sense?

When I saw the blurb for this article, I thought that's what the game designer might have had in mind, and I'm disappointed it wasn't.

So, in the timeline of the movies are there any extant Sith? And he said culture, not race -- so I'm guessing that at the time it existed the Sith had various members from different races/planets that formed a common culture. Also meaning that you wouldn't be able to pick them out by appearance, any more so than you can a Jedi. Right?

So during the timeline of the movies we really couldn't be sure that we have or have not seen a Sith, and I expect the 3rd trilogy will address some type of resurgence.

Lucas originally intended the Sith and the Jedi to be two sides to the same coin. You are neither until you learn to control the force, and the manner in which you control it (if you ever do) determines if you end up as Jedi or Sith. For example, both the Sith and the Jedi want to control the Galaxy- the Jedi want to be leaders of free people, while the Sith want to be rulers of their subjects.The entire point of the Anakin/Vader/Luke story is that when a Jedi does 'bad' things, he becomes a Sith, and when the Sith do 'good' things, they become a Jedi. And that's just not an easy thing to work into the game mechanics without ending up with all the griefers playing Sith, and all the Carebears playing Jedi.

All in all, it doesn't bother me too much (other than trying to pass it off as some kind of "culture" thing which is pure B.S.). As long as we don't see Sith and Jedi running around getting all buddy-buddy and helping each other out I think I can handle it.

So, in the timeline of the movies are there any extant Sith? And he said culture, not race -- so I'm guessing that at the time it existed the Sith had various members from different races/planets that formed a common culture. Also meaning that you wouldn't be able to pick them out by appearance, any more so than you can a Jedi. Right?

So during the timeline of the movies we really couldn't be sure that we have or have not seen a Sith, and I expect the 3rd trilogy will address some type of resurgence.

Lucas originally intended the Sith and the Jedi to be two sides to the same coin. You are neither until you learn to control the force, and the manner in which you control it (if you ever do) determines if you end up as Jedi or Sith. For example, both the Sith and the Jedi want to control the Galaxy- the Jedi want to be leaders of free people, while the Sith want to be rulers of their subjects.The entire point of the Anakin/Vader/Luke story is that when a Jedi does 'bad' things, he becomes a Sith, and when the Sith do 'good' things, they become a Jedi. And that's just not an easy thing to work into the game mechanics without ending up with all the griefers playing Sith, and all the Carebears playing Jedi.

All in all, it doesn't bother me too much (other than trying to pass it off as some kind of "culture" thing which is pure B.S.). As long as we don't see Sith and Jedi running around getting all buddy-buddy and helping each other out I think I can handle it.

At this point, I'm wondering if someone wrote out a storyline for the prequel trilogy that Lucas aggressively rewrote, having failed to understand it, and twisting it almost beyond recognition. I say this because it seems to me that there are pieces of a more complex, meaningful, and coherent storyline, like the parts of a locomotive, scattered throughout the train wreck of the actual prequel trilogy.

For instance, one thing that seems surprisingly consistent about Yoda is that, with a few exceptions when he was training Luke on Dagobah, all Yoda's advice and all his decisions are wrong. In particular, Yoda advises Luke that going to save his friends on Bespin would be disastrous and that he should ignore his feelings; Luke, by trusting his feelings, saved the people who enabled the Rebellion to defeat the Empire at Endor. Yoda (and Obi-Wan) warned Luke that Darth Vader was utterly beyond redemption; Luke trusted his feelings and turned Darth Vader/Anakin back to the light side, which meant the defeat of the Emperor.

The "prophecy" mentioned briefly in the prequel trilogy would have made perfect sense if it was Luke Skywalker who brought balance to the Force, by balancing the passion of the Dark Side with the calm reflection of the Light Side.

Can't you easily imagine a story about the good guys, the underdogs who believe in passion and creativity, overcoming the rigid, cold, unfeeling guardians of the status quo? Wouldn't a story in which the two sides were out of balance, each with their own claim to being right, have made more sense?

When I saw the blurb for this article, I thought that's what the game designer might have had in mind, and I'm disappointed it wasn't.

There are a number of alternate possibilities that have been explored over the years, though I don't know if the "what if Luke had stayed on Dagobah" story has ever been told. I certainly have to agree with you that Yoda made some bad decisions. But as he himself would tell you, hard to see, the future is. They were living in a time when the Dark Side clouded everything, particularly for those attuned to the Light Side of the Force. Yoda didn't become Grand Master by collecting bottle caps; he didn't win the title in a raffle. But like all people, his decisions and his advice were colored by long-held beliefs, regardless of any special insight.

When he warned Luke that he should complete his training rather than go to rescue his friends, Yoda could see the confrontation with Vader, which clearly Luke lost. And he certainly wasn't ready for the revelation that Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker; compare his reaction on Bespin to the way he acts after surrendering during Episode VI. In the first, his mind wasn't ready to accept Vader as his father, while in the second he had found the calm that Yoda wanted him to have. Yes, Luke was able to rescue his friends, who proved instrumental to winning the Battle of Endor, but what if he had completed his training and then defeated Darth Vader before that battle even took place?

As for the belief that Vader could not be redeemed, that was indeed more of a failing on Yoda's part, stemming from his belief that the Dark Side corrupts forever. He was wrong, but then, Vader did die very shortly after turning back to the Light. We have no idea whether his redemption would have stayed with him. Leia, after the only time she met the Force ghost of her father, said, "Maybe Vader had died heroically, but ten minutes of contrition did not make up for years of atrocities." Yoda's long-held belief in the corrupting nature of the Dark Side, coupled with the fact that he was around during Anakin's fall, and saw the assault he led on the Jedi Temple, complete with the murder of younglings, makes it very easy to understand why he would think this man had no good left in him.

I will agree, it does feel to some degree like they wasted a perfectly good plot. But I think its just as good a story to have the Prophecy of the Chosen One be referring to eliminating the pall of the Dark Side over the natural state of the Force when it speaks of "bringing balance", and since the movies as a whole are the story of Anakin Skywalker, I'm perfectly okay with him being the Chosen One after all.

The thing about Star Wars is that it has taken on a life of its own, far beyond anything Lucas was considering when writing the first drafts. He was mostly focusing on creating a new Buck Rogers, with some influence from spaghetti westerns and samurai movies.

Leia, after the only time she met the Force ghost of her father, said, "Maybe Vader had died heroically, but ten minutes of contrition did not make up for years of atrocities."

That's not a line from the movies, of course. In the context of Return of the Jedi, it seems pretty clear that we are to understand that Anakin Skywalker was redeemed in the end. There's the last exchange with Luke, when Luke says, "I've got to save you!", and Anakin replies, "You already have." A few minutes later, we see the ghosts of Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-Wan, all smiles, happily hanging out in the Force afterlife. It seems to be a quasi-Christian deathbed redemption, and it works, narratively.

Which gets me to the fundamental problem I have with the prequel trilogy: it does not work, narratively. The story simply doesn't make any sense. Red Letter Media does a pretty good job of picking out some of the serious plot issues in Phantom Menace My theory that the last movie had an obvious "black magic" plot in which Anakin is brought back to life, ironically at the cost of Padme's death, and this bound him to the Emperor -- except that Lucas put in the pieces but forgot what they were there for.

Red Letter Media also shows some clips of Lucas working with his creative team, which gets at the real problem: as RLM points out, you can see that Lucas's creative team is afraid of him. I'm quite serious that I think that someone else wrote a story for the prequel trilogy, which Lucas did not understand; Lucas added action scenes and cheap pathos scenes, and mangled the story to the extent that it didn't make sense anymore, and nobody who worked for him dared tell him that.

What I really loathe about Lucas is that he intentionally set out to clear away the stuff that had been added to the Star Wars canon, officially or unofficially, by other people. Sure, 90% of fanon is crap, but 90% of anything is crap -- the other 10% is gold, and there are few things I enjoy more than participating in the construction of a coherent shared fantasy.

The original trilogy was a straightforward fairy tale about a hero coming of age. Joseph Campbell's watered down Jungian stuff has a rational core -- there are patterns to mythic stories, and we have an intuitive feel for the logic of them -- which means it isn't exactly an act of genius to get the basic story right.